Well, Fuck.
Just when I thought I was wrapping up my anti-theist (or as they often say "militant atheist") blogging days I had to go and read Jerry Coyne's new book. He's officially part of the "New Atheist" clan now, joining the "four horseman" (Dennett, Harris, (the late) Hitchens, and Dawkins). I read Coyne's other book "Why Evolution Is True" years ago and had always respected him as a renown geneticist and evolutionary biologist. This book was such a fun read and really fans the flames of this historically long debate between religion and science. All the years I've discussed and debated with theists friends via email and social media are reflected in the pages of this book. If I was a Christian curious about atheism and read this book I would become an atheist more than any other "pro-atheist" book out there. I went through an extremely long back and forth discussion with a New Christian friend of mine via email for about a year discussing many of these topics. Almost everything we brought up and argued about is addressed in here and Jerry knocks each point out of the park.
In the end he summarizes the real dangers of religion besides the obvious issues in the Middle East. He mentions child abuse (denying children medical treatment due to religious affiliations), the suppression of research and vaccination due to religious affiliations, opposition to assisted dying (which I still don't understand - let's see, my religious relative is in pain and I want them to suffer here on Earth as long as possible and also withhold the speed at which they will be at peace with their creator. Makes sense. Not cruel at all.), global warming denialism and so on.
I read Kenneth Miller's book called Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution. Initially started this book as another book discussion with my New Christian friend who didn't think common descent was true and dismissed human evolution. My goal was to get this friend to see accepting evolution doesn't necessarily mean you need to become an atheist. This of course is true but Coyne addresses the folly of theistic evolution. It's simple really. Teleology is not science - period. What is theistic evolution? evolution with a purpose. This is a useless hypothesis to a scientist. There's no getting around this fact. It's just political. It's simply just good PR to not step on anyone's toes for fear of offending the sensitive religious community.
It's also a special pleading fallacy - for the theistic evolutionist- they take credit for the beauty of design and "irreducible complexity" (which has been debunked by the way) of organisms and the amazing wonders of the human eye - attribute it all to the glory of God. However, when it comes to evolutionary suffering and mass extinctions (99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct) that is NOT attributed to the glory of God but to "the fall of man". The fall of one single species of animal. - us.
Of
course explaining the past evolutionary suffering of most species (99%)
going extinct due to "the fall" of man before Homo sapiens even existed
is a tad problematic. Truly if you ask a New Christian why so much suffering and waste and extinction or really anything in the world that causes pain and seems to fly in the face of a moral, just, loving god they will 99.9% of the time attribute this to "the fall of man". You see, sin is like a virus infecting not just "Adam and Eve" (the first two humans that according to genetics didn't actually exist. This is also explained in great detail in this book) but all of their descendents and of course all other poor animals that had no say in the matter.
Or to quote Jerry Coyne on this point,
The flavor of special pleading is strong here, for surely God, were he really omnipotent, could have designed a world whose physical fabric lacked floods, drought, and evolutionary suffering. And, of course, if God gets the credit for the adaptive mutations that led to humans, why is he exculpated for the maladaptive ones, like mutations that cause cancers, genetic diseases, and deformed children? If mutation were a process designed by God, there's no reason why the vast majority of mutations should be harmful - though that's exactly what you'd expect if the process were purely a naturalistic one involving random errors.
Or to quote Jerry Coyne on this point,
The flavor of special pleading is strong here, for surely God, were he really omnipotent, could have designed a world whose physical fabric lacked floods, drought, and evolutionary suffering. And, of course, if God gets the credit for the adaptive mutations that led to humans, why is he exculpated for the maladaptive ones, like mutations that cause cancers, genetic diseases, and deformed children? If mutation were a process designed by God, there's no reason why the vast majority of mutations should be harmful - though that's exactly what you'd expect if the process were purely a naturalistic one involving random errors.
Coyne tackles all aspects of religion - it's self-proclaimed superiority in all things "moral". Of course this is a mere walk in the park to debunk by simply quoting immoral passages in the Bible. Putting that aside, what I've heard from the New Christians is at worst atheists are simply "borrowing" from the religious ancient moral foundations (well some of them not others obviously or we'd be stoning people and bashing babies into rocks) to create their moral landscape (to borrow a phrase from Sam Harris). I disagree of course because our morals actually were derived over time by naturalistic means through our evolutionary past and evolve with differing cultures. Even if this claim by the New Christians were true - I would simply answer to that. OK. So what? Thanks. we'll take those and we all have the same moral values now.. asking them to then explain how/why the religious win the morality debate. I don't get it. Why again does religion take credit for morality again?
There was another passage in this book I found interesting...
The fine-tuning argument for God gets even weaker because it includes the proviso "life as we know it" - that is, carbon-based life. But creatures sentient enough to perceive and worship God need not be the kind we know and love: our imaginations are limited by the life with which we're familiar. There could, for instance, be life based on silicon instead of carbon, life that could live at higher or lower gravity, or life that could have come into being instantly, rather than having evolved. After all, the Abrahamic God is omnipotent and so could fine-tune for whatever universe he created, rather than fine-tune the universe for life.
Indeed, why should life be based on matter at all? To many people, God is a humanlike spirit, one with feelings and some sort of consciousness. Couldn't he create a race of similar immaterial but whorshipful beings: bodiless minds that lack his powers? After all, any being with the power to determine physical constants could create any conceivable form of life, and God already is said to create souls, which are in effect bodiless minds. Why not just have a conclave of souls instead of material beings on Earth? The problem is that we simply don't know what forms of humanoid life - and here I mean "sentient, rational beings made in God's image" - are possible. Nor can theists explain WHY souls MUST have bodies."
Something to chew on for the religious.
It makes me wonder why God put souls of humanoids through the grinder of the physical world in the first place, having physical bodies then having to send his son / himself to the physical realm to be an ape to die for this species of apes for rules he logically shouldn't even have to follow in the first place. Stop to soak that in.
The idea that an all powerful being has "rules" he must follow is nonsensical. An all-powerful, Uncaused Cause, Mind that created this universe is mandated to accept blood sacrifice rules should set off mild skepticism in most people's brains. The spell of religion is strong in many people but just stop to think about this... Who is enforcing these rules?! You know how when a New or Old Christian argues for irreducible complexity all you simply have to do is say if complexity is a requirement of design then by definition God must be designed by a more complex entity? "Who created God?" you have probably often asked a New Christian and they of course say - no one! God is where it ends.. Though it seems we're seeing some "data" piling up here against this response. It seems maybe God does have a God who's rules he must follow - like the rule of atonement.
If God set up the "blood rules" (who else did unless my God's God hypothesis has merit) that due to the "fall of mankind" (his most beloved species, created in his image - remember God is a man with a penis) a perfect "sinless" being (his son/himself) must be killed then resurrected to make amends it raises the question "to who?" To who is God making amends to? Who set up these rules that even God must follow? I think quantum mechanics is less complicated than theology. It certainly makes more sense and I don't understand anything about quantum mechanics.
Often from a few of my New Christian friends I've heard that science has no philosophical basis or that "you can't use science itself to show that science is the best way - or even the only way - to discover truths about the universe."
Jerry responds,
Let's start with the last view, one often raised by philosophers (the argument is called "justificationism")... It sounds quite sophisticated, and in fact it's technically correct: science cannot justify by "reason alone" that it's the surest route to truth. How can you prove from philosophy and logic alone that scientific investigation, rather than, say, revelation, is the best way to determine the sequence of a newly discovered gene? There's no a priori philosophical justification for using science to understand the universe.
But we don't need one. My response to the "no justification" claim is that the superiority of science at finding objective truth comes not form philosophy but form "experience". Science gives predictions that work. Everything we know about biology, the cosmos, physics, and chemistry has come through science - not revelation, the arts, or any other "way of knowing". And the practical applications of science, channeled into engineering and medicine, are legion.
In the end, it may smack of circularity to use empirical results to justify the use of the empirical toolkit we call "science", but I'll pay attention to the circularity argument when someone comes up with a better way to understand nature. Science's results alone justify its usefulness, for it is, hands down, the single best way we've devised to understand the universe.
Many of you reading this have moved beyond such childish things as religion. Many of you, if religious at all are probably more deistic or Unitarian-like. If nothing else you may be someone who doesn't even think or care to think much about these ideas, often called "apatheists". However, I urge you to read Coyne's book, it should dispel any delusion that religion (and Coyne specifically defines this term right off the bat in the book) and science (again defined in book) are compatible. They are not. Never were or will be.
Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up: and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. - James 5:13-15
In the last part of the book Jerry talks about faith as a substitute for medicine.
It's not just the parents who are at fault. Religious exemptions are written into law by the federal and state governments - that is, those who represent all Americans. In fact, thirty-eight of the fifty states have religious exemptions for child abuse and neglect in their civil codes, fifteen states have such exemptions for misdemeanors, seventeen for felony crimes against children, and five (Idaho, Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia, and Arkansas) have exemptions for manslaughter, murder, or capital murder. Altogether, forty-three of the fifty states confer some type of civil or criminal immunity on parents who injure their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds.
This got me thinking... find yourself a die-hard fundamentalist Christian American - You could find a Ray Comfort/Ken Hovind type of believer and ask them first where they stand on this new debacle of the religious rights of Christan (obviously not other religions) business owners to refuse service to homosexuals. You'll more than likely see they side with the Christian business owner to support their notion of religious freedom in this country. Now see how far they take this "religious freedom". Do they accept religious freedom or exemption on religious basis for vaccinations or withholding care by Christian parents from their sick or dying children? Does the state not have the right to step in seeing as to most of us this is child abuse?
You may see there could be a few caveats to their thoughts on religious freedoms. 1. of course, "religious freedom" often only applies to Christians - not Satanists or especially Muslims (eww). and 2. It doesn't apply when letting a child die. Or does it? Maybe they do go as far a the Jehovah Witness or Christian Science devotees. You guild these religious people trapping them right into a corner created by their nonsensical religious moral dogmas. Hopefully they can see what's happening here - you are a moral person - DESPITE your belief in your chosen religious dogma.
I think this book is very important. Of course Richard Dawkins' atheist manifesto book "The God Delusion" was a huge de-converting tool for many of the young religious. I was already an atheist when I read that book but it certainly informed me on a few aspects to the "god argument" I hadn't been exposed to. Since then the book has had a hefty handful of counter-books by religious authors. Most criticisms of Dawkins and the "new atheists" as a whole, as Coyne points out at the beginning of this book, are that they simply beat up on the literalists and the extreme fundamentalists of each religion. Reza Aslan says the same thing about Islam as a Muslim apologists. Bill Maher and all the "new atheists" simply have a child-like, simplistic view of what religion is.
I couldn't disagree more. The world in which Reza Aslan paints is a world I would love to live in but sadly we're not quite there yet. The general whole of the religious are not like liberal theologians in each religion. Sorry. The fact is most people in this country think some really unfounded, debunked drivel often derived from their religion. Creationism (just google the percentage of American citizens that don't accept evolution), global warming denial, alternative medicine, astrology, new age woo and so on. There is a serious need for books like these from the "new atheists" because there is still such a large audience of brain-washed people still under the spell of religion - often since childhood. If any book could dissipate the spell of an entire lifetime of religious indoctrination I think this is one of them.
There was another passage in this book I found interesting...
The fine-tuning argument for God gets even weaker because it includes the proviso "life as we know it" - that is, carbon-based life. But creatures sentient enough to perceive and worship God need not be the kind we know and love: our imaginations are limited by the life with which we're familiar. There could, for instance, be life based on silicon instead of carbon, life that could live at higher or lower gravity, or life that could have come into being instantly, rather than having evolved. After all, the Abrahamic God is omnipotent and so could fine-tune for whatever universe he created, rather than fine-tune the universe for life.
Indeed, why should life be based on matter at all? To many people, God is a humanlike spirit, one with feelings and some sort of consciousness. Couldn't he create a race of similar immaterial but whorshipful beings: bodiless minds that lack his powers? After all, any being with the power to determine physical constants could create any conceivable form of life, and God already is said to create souls, which are in effect bodiless minds. Why not just have a conclave of souls instead of material beings on Earth? The problem is that we simply don't know what forms of humanoid life - and here I mean "sentient, rational beings made in God's image" - are possible. Nor can theists explain WHY souls MUST have bodies."
Something to chew on for the religious.
It makes me wonder why God put souls of humanoids through the grinder of the physical world in the first place, having physical bodies then having to send his son / himself to the physical realm to be an ape to die for this species of apes for rules he logically shouldn't even have to follow in the first place. Stop to soak that in.
The idea that an all powerful being has "rules" he must follow is nonsensical. An all-powerful, Uncaused Cause, Mind that created this universe is mandated to accept blood sacrifice rules should set off mild skepticism in most people's brains. The spell of religion is strong in many people but just stop to think about this... Who is enforcing these rules?! You know how when a New or Old Christian argues for irreducible complexity all you simply have to do is say if complexity is a requirement of design then by definition God must be designed by a more complex entity? "Who created God?" you have probably often asked a New Christian and they of course say - no one! God is where it ends.. Though it seems we're seeing some "data" piling up here against this response. It seems maybe God does have a God who's rules he must follow - like the rule of atonement.
If God set up the "blood rules" (who else did unless my God's God hypothesis has merit) that due to the "fall of mankind" (his most beloved species, created in his image - remember God is a man with a penis) a perfect "sinless" being (his son/himself) must be killed then resurrected to make amends it raises the question "to who?" To who is God making amends to? Who set up these rules that even God must follow? I think quantum mechanics is less complicated than theology. It certainly makes more sense and I don't understand anything about quantum mechanics.
Often from a few of my New Christian friends I've heard that science has no philosophical basis or that "you can't use science itself to show that science is the best way - or even the only way - to discover truths about the universe."
Jerry responds,
Let's start with the last view, one often raised by philosophers (the argument is called "justificationism")... It sounds quite sophisticated, and in fact it's technically correct: science cannot justify by "reason alone" that it's the surest route to truth. How can you prove from philosophy and logic alone that scientific investigation, rather than, say, revelation, is the best way to determine the sequence of a newly discovered gene? There's no a priori philosophical justification for using science to understand the universe.
But we don't need one. My response to the "no justification" claim is that the superiority of science at finding objective truth comes not form philosophy but form "experience". Science gives predictions that work. Everything we know about biology, the cosmos, physics, and chemistry has come through science - not revelation, the arts, or any other "way of knowing". And the practical applications of science, channeled into engineering and medicine, are legion.
In the end, it may smack of circularity to use empirical results to justify the use of the empirical toolkit we call "science", but I'll pay attention to the circularity argument when someone comes up with a better way to understand nature. Science's results alone justify its usefulness, for it is, hands down, the single best way we've devised to understand the universe.
Many of you reading this have moved beyond such childish things as religion. Many of you, if religious at all are probably more deistic or Unitarian-like. If nothing else you may be someone who doesn't even think or care to think much about these ideas, often called "apatheists". However, I urge you to read Coyne's book, it should dispel any delusion that religion (and Coyne specifically defines this term right off the bat in the book) and science (again defined in book) are compatible. They are not. Never were or will be.
Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up: and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. - James 5:13-15
In the last part of the book Jerry talks about faith as a substitute for medicine.
It's not just the parents who are at fault. Religious exemptions are written into law by the federal and state governments - that is, those who represent all Americans. In fact, thirty-eight of the fifty states have religious exemptions for child abuse and neglect in their civil codes, fifteen states have such exemptions for misdemeanors, seventeen for felony crimes against children, and five (Idaho, Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia, and Arkansas) have exemptions for manslaughter, murder, or capital murder. Altogether, forty-three of the fifty states confer some type of civil or criminal immunity on parents who injure their children by withholding medical care on religious grounds.
This got me thinking... find yourself a die-hard fundamentalist Christian American - You could find a Ray Comfort/Ken Hovind type of believer and ask them first where they stand on this new debacle of the religious rights of Christan (obviously not other religions) business owners to refuse service to homosexuals. You'll more than likely see they side with the Christian business owner to support their notion of religious freedom in this country. Now see how far they take this "religious freedom". Do they accept religious freedom or exemption on religious basis for vaccinations or withholding care by Christian parents from their sick or dying children? Does the state not have the right to step in seeing as to most of us this is child abuse?
You may see there could be a few caveats to their thoughts on religious freedoms. 1. of course, "religious freedom" often only applies to Christians - not Satanists or especially Muslims (eww). and 2. It doesn't apply when letting a child die. Or does it? Maybe they do go as far a the Jehovah Witness or Christian Science devotees. You guild these religious people trapping them right into a corner created by their nonsensical religious moral dogmas. Hopefully they can see what's happening here - you are a moral person - DESPITE your belief in your chosen religious dogma.
I think this book is very important. Of course Richard Dawkins' atheist manifesto book "The God Delusion" was a huge de-converting tool for many of the young religious. I was already an atheist when I read that book but it certainly informed me on a few aspects to the "god argument" I hadn't been exposed to. Since then the book has had a hefty handful of counter-books by religious authors. Most criticisms of Dawkins and the "new atheists" as a whole, as Coyne points out at the beginning of this book, are that they simply beat up on the literalists and the extreme fundamentalists of each religion. Reza Aslan says the same thing about Islam as a Muslim apologists. Bill Maher and all the "new atheists" simply have a child-like, simplistic view of what religion is.
I couldn't disagree more. The world in which Reza Aslan paints is a world I would love to live in but sadly we're not quite there yet. The general whole of the religious are not like liberal theologians in each religion. Sorry. The fact is most people in this country think some really unfounded, debunked drivel often derived from their religion. Creationism (just google the percentage of American citizens that don't accept evolution), global warming denial, alternative medicine, astrology, new age woo and so on. There is a serious need for books like these from the "new atheists" because there is still such a large audience of brain-washed people still under the spell of religion - often since childhood. If any book could dissipate the spell of an entire lifetime of religious indoctrination I think this is one of them.
